Settings

The settings panel is raised from the top toolbar of the application:

One raised, it shows a number of different tabs, each being focused on a part of the available settings:

Two settings presets can be selected from the top combo box. They allow to define two sets of parameters. The Default preset holds parameters for realtime interaction in the viewport while the Render preset can be selected when doing any rendering operation (see Rendering). The properties under the Render preset are high quality settings not necessarily suited for realtime.

Note:

Editing the Default preset is immediately visible in the main viewport.

Anti-aliasing

NDunes features two different anti-aliasing techniques, each dedicated to a specific rendering need:

TAA is meant to be used mainly for real-time display, but it can also be used for film rendering when the "TAA number of averaged frames" counter is greater than 1. For instance when set to 16, there will be 16 frames rendered and accumulated to produce a final image. TAA is fast, but TAA with frames accumulation is slow due to the repeated rendering of a frame. Note that TAA with accumulation only works when rendering. It does not work in the viewport display. FSAA is meant to be used for film rendering and its slower than normal TAA. FSAA is stable in animation, while TAA can exhibit motion artifacts. FSAA overrides any TAA setting when enabled, so only FSAA is enabled at a time.

FSAA is activated by setting a size multiplier above x1. TAA is enabled or disabled just by the check box aside.

If you're not familiar with temporal anti-aliasing, don't bother modifying any of these settings. If you wish to get into the details of it:

Plants settings

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Exact spawn enabled in the right image

Cascaded Shadow Maps settings

Cascaded shadow maps (CSM) are defined for the star - the sun - and only for it. This allow NDunes to show shadows up to a very large distance. If you're not familiar with the concept, the term "Cascade" just means several shadow maps. For instance the first shadow map will capture shadows between 10 cm and 5 meters, the second one between 4 meters and 15 meters, and so on. NDunes uses 8 passes of CSMs in order to be able to capture shadows very far away, which is a must have here as we have very long viewing distances.

Note that star CSM settings are overrided for Geometries that are using private shadows. See Defining a geometry for details.

Atmospheric settings

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No atmospheric landscape shadows to the left; shadows enabled to the right

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No atmospheric clouds shadows to the left; shadows enabled to the right

Note that atmospheric effects in NDunes are plain volumetric effects so while they have a significant cost they are working regardless of the position of the sun in the scene, unlike typical post-processing effects that are based on a visible sun.

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No clouds relighting on the left, 50% (default) clouds relighting on the right

Miscellaneous settings

Performances